Surrey Homes | SH109 | February 2024 | Education Supplement inside

At the request of her friend
Charlie, Jane Howard
chats farm machinery
My friend Charlie, who
claims to be a regular
reader of this column, says
he feels he now knows a great deal
about calving, lambing, hedges, pannage
and pastures, but what about machines!
Hmmm, good point, Charlie! Only trouble
is I’ve no idea how most of it works or what
the many buttons, knobs, levers and diagrams are
for, so all I can offer is a flim-flam reflection on the
bits of kit that are invaluable to a small farm like this,
with very little under-the-bonnet knowledge or advice.
When we first arrived at Coopers Farm in 1999,
weekends would see us at farm sales furiously bidding
on all manner of machinery we believed was essential
for small-time farmers like ourselves.
The ancient Massey Ferguson red
tractor, the Howard (no relation as far
as I know) muck spreader, the Welger
hay baler that on a good day would
spew out about nine small bales before
giving up. And, most memorable, the
post-war bale elevator, effectively an
escalator on wheels that replaced the
pitchfork by mechanically transporting
bales from ground level up into the
hay loft. It stood about 20 feet tall but
this didn’t deter us from lashing it to a
trailer and – with my nephew holding
on tight to minimise the likelihood of it
falling off – driving back from Horam
in high spirits. Did we really do that?
What Adrian and I had failed to realise
was that all these gems were being sold off by farmers
who had seen the future and scaled up to bigger machines
more able to meet the demands of modern day farming.
We had bought museum pieces and how thrilled we were
until we realised how quaint and time-consuming they
were compared to the shiny kit of our neighbours. And
of course there were never any parts or handy engineers
to fix them when they broke, which they frequently did.
We soon realised the
smart move was to
contract out most
of the one-off jobs
such as hay making,
muck spreading
and hedge cutting
to those people with
the big shiny kit but,
of course, we still
needed a tractor.
We soon realised the smart move was to contract out
most of the one-off jobs such as hay making, muck
spreading and hedge cutting to those people with the
big shiny kit but, of course, we still needed a tractor.
The old Massey which we started
every day by inserting a screwdriver,
even in freezing snow, was replaced
by a super smart new John Deere. It’s
not the smallest – they belong on golf
courses and fruit farms where they are
required to get between the rows – but
at just 50hp (that’s horsepower if you’re
not machinery minded) it’s the minnow
of their agricultural range. Go on the
John Deere website – Charlie, you’d love
it – and read about the 9XT with its
Hydra Cushion front axle suspension,
G5 Command Centre (I think that’s
butch tractor speak for the instrument
panel) and a whopping 680hp and
you get an idea of how small ours is.
And now I realise I haven’t even talked
about all the other bits of machinery on the farm, like the
tedder, the vibrating harrow (did you know they could?),
the topper and the yard scraper. So there might at some
point in the future have to be a second instalment of
‘Reflections on machinery at Coopers Farm,’ but you’ll
be pleased to hear that’s not coming any time soon
and next month, March, we’ll be full on lambing with
plenty of tales from the sheep shed to report on.
Find out more about daily life at Coopers Farm by visiting coopersfarmstonegate.co.uk
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